Eight months ago, Charles Wilson, a researcher from John Oliver's HBO show, Last Week Tonight, contacted us to ask about our project of buying and cancelling debt. We kicked off the Rolling Jubilee in 2012 with a widely publicized telethon (featuring comedians David Rees, Lizz Winstead, and Hari Kondabolu and members of TV On the Radio, Sonic Youth, Fugazi, among others). The project went viral [hier im Blog] and has been regularly covered in the press over the years, including the New York Times, the Guardian and NPR. […]

Wilson told us Last Week Tonight was interested in reproducing our feat. […] We spent hours on the phone and email with them explaining how we did our work and connecting them to other experts and resources.

At the last minute Wilson told us LWT did not want to associate themselves with the work of the Rolling Jubilee due to its roots in Occupy Wall Street. Instead John Oliver framed the debt buy as his idea: a giveaway to compete with Oprah. The lead researcher who worked on this segment invoked the cover of journalism to justify distancing themselves from our project.

Schaeffer has repudiated reactionary politics and become an advocate for social justice. In this riveting, 5.5 minute interview with Full Frontal's Samantha Bee, Schaeffer lays out the history of the reactionary right in America, and the consequences of the alliance between evangelicals and finance capitalism, from Fox News to the Iraq War.

„Generating a Billion Personal News Feeds: With exponential growth of information and improved access, there is more and more data and not enough time to digest it. Facebook’s News Feed attempts to solve this by offering a way to show the most relevant content to each individual person. We create billions of personalized experiences by ranking stories for each person.“

Worries that personalisation on the internet could create “filter bubbles”, within which people see only what fits with their existing views, have come home to roost. That turns out to mean not just convenient truths, but also myths and distortions, propagated by algorithms which score them by popularity, not truthfulness. And it’s not just ignoramuses whose news is thus polluted: the recent furore over Facebook’s curation of its trending topics suggests that anyone who leans on social media for their news may be seeing a funhouse mirror of the truth.

Thus the right to free speech has morphed into the ability to say and spread anything, no matter how daft or dangerous. Hence the buzz around the idea of “post-truth politics” – although a cynic might wonder if politicians are actually any more dishonest than they used to be. Perhaps it’s just that fibs once whispered into select ears are now overheard by everyone.

We have been here before. As printing became widely available in the 1600s, there was a boom in pamphleteering: cheap, crude publications, often denouncing political and social foes in vitriolic and slanderous terms. These were important in fomenting both the English civil war and the American war of independence.

The idea that the fusion of technology and media may have revolutionary outcomes – primed this time round by politicians rather than proletarians – will alarm those who prefer the status quo: there have been calls for the new media titans to be regulated. To be sure, they cannot carry on dodging their responsibilities. But the ultimate answer isn’t policing social media for rabble-rousing mistruths, but bursting the filter bubbles and talking to those who disagree with us. Because we need democracy to be more than just a popularity contest.